Multiple Intelligences – A Brief Overview, by Terrie Spieker (1/2)
During the eight years I spent as a teacher with Colorado’s Littleton Public Schools, I strove to establish an inspirational, direct, and most importantly, a direct teaching style that provided all of my students with an education of the highest caliber. In my mind, creating an engaging and supportive learning environment stands apart as one of the most important components of a teacher’s role in the classroom. First and foremost, an educator must understand that every student processes information differently, some children displaying a strong grasp of material more quickly than others.
In many cases, a student who displays a poor attitude or a notable lack of interest in source material requires additional attention, but not because he or she lacks the capacity to keep pace with the rest of the class. Rather than categorizing a struggling student as a “problem learner,” teachers should make a concerted effort to ascertain the underlying causes that inhibit certain young learners from keeping pace with their peers. All too often, the answer to this educational conundrum stems from what many refer to as “multiple intelligences,” a concept pioneered in the early 1980s by Dr. Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University.
Positing that the conventional definition of intelligence gleaned from structured standardized tests limits both students and teachers, Dr. Gardner proposed an innovative theory that took eight differentiated intelligences into consideration, rather than focusing on the commonly accepted and simplistic notion that higher Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.) scores serve as the primary indicator of future academic success.
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